FreeBSD is a freely available, full source 4.4BSD-Lite2
based release for Intel
i386/i486/Pentium/PentiumPro/Pentium II (or compatible) and
DEC Alpha based computer systems. It is based primarily on
software from U.C. Berkeley's CSRG group, with some
enhancements from NetBSD, OpenBSD, 386BSD, and the Free
Software Foundation.

Since our release of FreeBSD 2.0 in late 94, the
performance, feature set, and stability of FreeBSD has
improved dramatically. The largest change is a revamped
virtual memory system with a merged VM/file buffer cache
that not only increases performance, but reduces FreeBSD's
memory footprint, making a 5MB configuration a more
acceptable minimum. Other enhancements include full NIS
client and server support, transaction TCP support,
dial-on-demand PPP, an improved SCSI subsystem, ISDN
support, support for ATM, FDDI and Fast Ethernet (100Mbit)
adapters, improved support for the Adaptec 2940 (WIDE and
narrow) and many hundreds of bug fixes.

We have also taken the comments and suggestions of many of
our users to heart and have attempted to provide what we
hope is a more sane and easily understood installation
process. Your feedback on this (constantly evolving)
process is especially welcome!

In addition to the base distributions, FreeBSD offers a new
ported software collection with hundreds of commonly
sought-after programs. By mid-September 1999, there were
more than 2600 ports! The list of ports ranges from http
(WWW) servers, to games, languages, editors and almost
everything in between. The entire ports collection requires
approximately 50MB of storage, all ports being expressed as
``deltas'' to their original sources. This makes it much
easier for us to update ports, and greatly reduces the disk
space demands made by the older 1.0 ports collection. To
compile a port, you simply change to the directory of the
program you wish to install, type make
all followed by make install
after successful compilation and let the system do the
rest. The full original distribution for each port you
build is retrieved dynamically off the CDROM or a local ftp
site, so you need only enough disk space to build the ports
you want. (Almost) every port is also provided as a
pre-compiled ``package'' which can be installed with a
simple command (pkg_add) by those who do not wish to
compile their own ports from source.

A number of additional documents which you may find very
helpful in the process of installing and using FreeBSD may
now also be found in the
/usr/share/doc directory on any machine running
FreeBSD 2.1 or later. You may view the locally installed
manuals with any HTML capable browser using the following
URLs:

The core of FreeBSD does not contain DES code which would
inhibit its being exported outside the United States. There
is an add-on package to the core distribution, for use only
in the United States, that contains the programs that
normally use DES. The auxiliary packages provided
separately can be used by anyone. A freely (from outside
the U.S.) exportable European distribution of DES for our
non-U.S. users also exists and is described in the FreeBSD FAQ.

If password security for FreeBSD is all you need, and you
have no requirement for copying encrypted passwords from
different hosts (Suns, DEC machines, etc) into FreeBSD
password entries, then FreeBSD's MD5 based security may be
all you require! We feel that our default security model is
more than a match for DES, and without any messy export
issues to deal with. If you are outside (or even inside)
the U.S., give it a try!